


[Meta] Could muggles really win a war against wizards?

by Panterest6981



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: A war against the Wizards, Muggle vs. Wizard: Dawn of Destruction?, Muggle/Wizard Relations, Muggles
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-02-15
Updated: 2017-02-15
Packaged: 2018-09-24 14:58:38
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,050
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9767192
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Panterest6981/pseuds/Panterest6981
Summary: As the title says, this is my opinion on why muggles could never win against wizards.





	

There have been some theories going around the internet that at some point Wizards must have gotten into a war with muggles and lost. I find this notion to be ridiculous and arrogant. 

The theory suggests that at some point in the past, possibly the middle ages, muggles were able to engage in a systematic persecution of wizards, by way of witch hunts and brought the entire wizarding world to its knees. It suggests that Muggles killed the most powerful of the wizards, destroyed magical knowledge, and created the Ministry of Magic to keep wizards in check.

Bull shit. Nonsense. Utter hogwash.

We are looking at their entire (yes I know fictional) world through the lens of our own world and the very idea is laughable.  
Let’s take a single wizard. What is this wizard afraid of? What are his basic needs? There are eight basic human needs for survival. Air, water, food, shelter, sanitation, touch, sleep, and personal space. Now let’s look at a wizard.

• Air is covered by the fact we live on planet earth. But we have seen that this is more easily accessible to a wizard. They have developed methods of bringing fresh air with them to areas that don’t have it, i.e. the bubble head charm. They have also found a way of not needing to breath air at all, i.e. gillyweed. So this need is covered with redundancy.

• How about water? The ability to conjure clean drinking water using the Aguamenti Spell is taught to all sixth years as a part of their NEWTS. It is likely in the Standard book of Spells by Miranda Goshawk, meaning it is a standard spell. While I imagine it has fallen somewhat into disuse due to clean drinking water becoming readily available via other means it is still a part of the standard curriculum.

• Food would require more work on behalf of our hypothetical wizard. To hunt his own food he would have to travel to where the food is likely to be (apparition), summon the food to him (accio), kill it (cutting spells), skin it (I couldn’t find a specific spell that did this but does anyone believe there couldn’t be one), and cook it (fire spells). I’ll leave it to your imagination how he might get his vegetables, but let’s face it, he’s not going to starve.

• Then there’s shelter. The impervious charm is the first thing that comes to my mind. But basic transfiguration and sticking charms are probably more useful. No great skill is involved in building a house, look at the Burrow, rooms tacked on all over the place. Knowing what we do about the Weasleys it is highly likely they simple did the work themselves. And don’t forget wizarding tents. A few bits of fabric, some space expansion charms and you can fit a whole family inside a space meant for two.

• I think this easy shelter would easily cover the basic need to sleep too. Safety might be a factor, but with muggle repelling charms, keeping muggles way and there also the basic repelling charm that could no doubt be used to keep animals away, there’s no reason to suspect our wizard wouldn’t have a warm, dry, comfortable nights’ sleep.

• As for sanitation is there anything that wouldn’t be easily covered with judicious application of the cleaning charm? Even if this simply washed something away, it’s not like a wizard needs to worry about contaminating the ground water, he has an unlimited supply of fresh. Someone more qualified than me might give some other examples, but a thousand years ago, four wizards build a castle with indoor plumbing. They were not behind the times. (If the plumbing had been added later, someone would have found the Chamber of Secrets when the pipes were installed, ergo, they are original.)

• Touch and personal space almost seem like they contradict each other. They imply a human needs other people around them but not too close. Neither is something a spell can really fix or mitigate or change. Only another human can provide one and only the absence of a human can provide the other. How a wizard would go about getting these thing and which he might prioritize is discussed below.

So the basic fact is no wizard is reliant on a muggle to survive. If a wizard landed on a deserted island, he’d have food, water, shelter and be sitting on the beach, drinking from a coconut before dinner. Of course after a couple of days of this he might decide he’d had enough and apparate home.

If necessity is the mother of all invention, then wizards do have a problem. Because a wizard has no real necessities. So of course there would be no real innovation. One could argue that the advancement of muggle should have created the necessity to advance themselves as well. But it has really only been in the last one, maybe two hundred years, that the commodities that wizards have taken for granted for millennia have become more common place.

But the single biggest reason that it would be impossible for the muggles to truly attack a wizard is something wizards can do simply by instinct. That is this.

Apparition.

It’s not comfortable and a lot of wizards don’t like it, but I imagine it’s like horseback riding. Before the floo network, portkeys or brooms were invented it would be the way all wizards got around. It’s something even a child can do as evidenced by Harry ending up of the school roof as a child. Yes, it can be dangerous, so are horses. And there is no record of anyone dying from apparition. (Though I’m sure that doesn’t mean no one has.)

Apparition and even the other methods of travel, completely change the very foundation of a wizarding society. We can see this in the books but it hasn’t really been explored. Wizards don’t need to live together in communities. Some do, of course, such as Hogsmead, but it’s the only wizarding settlement in England and it’s walking distance to the only school.

Wizards don’t need to be close to each other. The Weasleys live in Devon. According to Google maps, in a car it would take roughly three and a half hours to reach London. Flying it would take over an hour. But a wizard can do it in seconds. “Oh honey, we’re out of milk, I’ll pop into town to get some.” Pop and you’re in London, pop and you’re home. If it took more than five minutes, you stopped to chat along the way.

There are eleven schools in the world that teach magic. Eleven schools to teach all the world’s children. Travelling is so easy and accessible they can transport hundreds of thousands of children to school every year. Older students who can apparate themselves might not even have to board at the school.

So how would an attack on the wizarding world even work? Even if we assume that once upon a time wizards lived more closely and integrated with muggle society after the first death, would they really be able to keep it quiet? How would they attack a wizard? With the flame freezing charm fire is out, they could hang them, crush them stab them, (they couldn’t drown them) and there are countless other methods humans used to kill each other, but how would a muggle keep a wizard from leaving?

The article suggests that the witch hunts were more successful than reported. That the ministry is somehow colluding with muggles to neuter wizards and regulate them into powerlessness. Tell me, is this the same ministry run by purebloods? Do you imagine if Lucius Malfoy were able to get his hands on information that said muggles had systematically murdered a bunch of wizards and forced a cover-up, that he would keep quiet about it? Keep quiet about proof that his raging bigotry is entirely justified?

How could they force ghosts into silence? The Grey Lady at Hogwarts is almost a thousand years old. Or are we assuming the purge happened before that? Would the muggles of that time even be capable of it? I’m not saying it couldn’t be done, just that the levels of planning, organisation, communication, forethought and secrecy needed to pull it off would be completely out of the realm of possibility for a muggle in the dark ages.

If an army marched on a wizarding settlement, they would be moving at, at best, walking speed. No way a wizard could miss them. If a smaller group attacked, a wizard would simple pack up and leave. How long would it realistically take? How effective is Tonks’ Pack spell? Could it pack up all the items in a house? Once the personal belongings are packed what else does a wizard need?

The article points to the Minister of Magic informing the muggle Prime Minister that they are bringing a dragon into the country and that he’s even called the Minister of Magic in the first place, normally a title reserved for a lesser position. But wizards are known for imitating muggles, and they don’t really care about the truth when doing so. See wizards wearing dresses as an example. They are imitating something they don’t really understand, don’t even care to understand and thinking it’s perfectly normal. Plus wizards consider magic to be the best thing in the world.

And keep in mind, it’s not like they asked permission to bring in a dragon. If muggles were regulating the wizarding government, surely they’d have some kind of ban on bringing in such a devastatingly powerful creature. It's simply a warning of what they've done.   
Responsibility absolved. If something happens and a muggle is hurt, well it's not like they weren't warned, what more did they want? Frankly it displays a level of cooperation and consideration, if a fair amount of condescension, that wizards wouldn't see if the situation were reversed.

There is also the fact the wizards have an International Confederation of Wizards. The International Confederation was founded sometime before 1692 as that’s when they instituted the International Statute of Wizarding Secrecy. Are we to assume the muggle conspiracy is global?

The differences between the wizarding world and the muggle world are vast. Things that might terrify a muggle are commonplace to a wizard. For example, Neville Longbottom. He states in the first book that his first display of magic came when his uncle was holding by his ankles out a window and let go. Now if a muggle did that they would be in prison for child endangerment so fast it would make their head spill (one would hope) and if Neville had indeed been a squib as they suspected it would have been potentially life threatening. But a wizard on the other hand, has magic. Neville bounced. Another child might have floated themselves or cushioned the ground or apparated back to safety. The point is, to a wizard a fall that would kill a muggle is nothing.

Later in second year Harry falls from his broom and breaks his arm. Again with the height he was travelling at it would have killed a muggle but he escaped with a broken arm. Madam Pomfrey says, “I can mend bones in a second — but growing them back—” Even regrowing bone only requires a single night in the hospital wing. And that’s for children. An adult going into St Mungos might just have been given a potion. ‘Take this and call me in the morning.’

So with that kind of health care available and realistically only an apparition trip away, and that’s if they can’t just do it themselves, wizards are likely to take much more risks in their day to day life than a muggle. Walking out on a ledge of a fifty story building? No problem. Dragon wrangling? Sounds exciting? Flying through the air on an over-sized twig? They’ve been doing that since they were kids.

One could argue that the muggles of today might be able to win a war with the wizards, citing the speed at which guns could fire over curses, the lack of air defences and the inability to effect anything outside of their range of vision. It’s true that the muggles have incredibly effective long distance weapons. But is it really true that muggles wouldn’t be able to see them coming? Moody had a foe glass in his office. Are we saying magic wouldn’t consider a missile to be an enemy of some sort?

And where would a missile even be aimed? Hogwarts? Would you argue that humans of today would fire a missile at a school full of children? Diagon Alley? A small narrow street in the centre of one of the most crowded cities in the world? Maybe just the individual houses of the wizarding families? How would they even find them?

Let’s go with the theory that while muggle repelling wards divert the attention of any muggles in the area they would be useless against computer mapping and targeting. The only way to locate the home of a wizard would be via satellite images. What would a muggle be looking for from orbit to identify the home of a wizard?

Yes, a sniper would be able to take out an entire group of wizards without being noticed. But remember outside of shopping centres and government buildings, wizards don’t really meet in groups. So how many people are in danger from that?

A bullet may be just as effective at killing as the killing curse and a missile is devastating against large areas, but what about Fiendfyre? Look up the Great Fire of London or the Great Chicago Fire and tell me that a single wizard casting fiendfyre in the centre of London or New York or Tokyo wouldn’t cause devastating loss of life and infrastructure. Those fires are said to have had a relatively small death count but they were accidental.

If the muggle world ever did initiate violence against wizards, I think wizards would be fairly slow in reacting. They would put down the initial deaths to unfortunate losses and urge people to be more careful. Wizarding culture treats muggles as a bunch of mentally deficient children eg Martin Miggs the mad muggle. They don’t care about muggles. They don’t consider them a threat. So it would take a fairly major attack to get the entire wizarding world up in arms. (And it would be the entire wizarding world. Muggles are separated by countries with some hostile relations just between ourselves. Would wizards draw the same lines on maps as muggles do? There are eleven schools in the world, might that not mean there are eleven countries. Just a theory.)

Would the wizarding world even choose to retaliate with violence? Certainly some would. But they don’t kill muggles when they find out about magic, they remove their memories. Not something that would work on computers. But how long would that be a stop gap? How long before wizards realise where they are getting their information from? We know that Hogwarts interferes with electronics, though whether that is the result of intentionally set wards or simply ambient magic in unclear. If it’s wards what’s to stop them setting up those wards around, say, New York? If it’s simply a reaction to magic it would be more difficult. They would have to seek out all the computer servers and destroy them.

Finding them might be difficult, (though I have opinions that divination could be more widely applied than simply used to tell the future) but they could imperious someone into telling them. A single wizard would be enough to take out a huge number of server farms all across the world in a single night. Apparate some distance away from the location, maybe get closer using a broom and disillusionment charm, then use fiendfyre or a water cannon or some kind of earth spell or kill the power. In terms of infrastructure lost that would be devastating, and there is no question such an action would halt a war or at least force muggles to rethink one. And all potentially without a single loss of life.  
And of course there's the notion of simply using imperious on a world leader and having them fire a nuke at their own cities.

I've heard the argument that wizards wouldn’t hate muggles if they weren’t afraid of them. I would point out the prejudice displayed by wizards might be more in line with the disgust an ignorant asshole might feel for the mentally handicapped. Even those wizards who don’t feel that disgust, don’t really consider muggles as people worth knowing.

Most of the arguments I hear state that muggles would simply overpower wizards by sheer numbers. I don't see how they could. What good is an army of millions when they don't know where to attack? All of this assumes that muggles are the ones doing the attacking and wizards never get the chance to retaliate. How much damage could a well trained team of wizards do against power plants, roads, dams, airports, farms, ports? A wizard is self sufficient on his own. Muggles require a great deal of infrastructure backing them up before they they even think about becoming a threat.

We as muggles don’t like the idea that someone might look down on us so have come up with ideas that say it isn’t, couldn’t be true. And there are certainly some systems of magic in other stories where this might be the case. But I don’t think it could possibly be true for the Harry Potter universe. Too much of what we’ve seen, in the books and movie, may be narrowly applied in canon but could be devastating to life as we know it, if it were ever to be used against us.

It’s true that wizards are complacent. And it’s also true that they might not be able to be so complacent for much longer. But I do not think that as things stand now and with the capabilities we have already seen displayed by the wizards of Rowling’s world that wizards could possibly have lost a war to muggles. Especially not in the distant past.


End file.
